Just Passing Through

By Robert Alter

Published: May 20, 2001

This highly instructive investigation of the role of spirits from the other world in Shakespeare is in several respects Stephen Greenblatt's finest work since his early ''Renaissance Self-Fashioning.'' It also gives the odd appearance of being two books somewhat tenuously linked, until, rather near the end, it resoundingly convinces us of the connection between its two parts.

The first 150 pages of ''Hamlet in Purgatory'' are devoted to a painstaking inquiry into the fate of the late-medieval notion of purgatory under the Protestant Reformation in 16th-century England. Greenblatt patiently shapes his account from a rich variety of historical sources -- religious polemical tracts, devotional texts, obscure poems and prose narratives, artwork (the jacket illustration, taken from a painting by Bosch, is truly stunning) and funerary inscriptions. The doctrine of purgatory, as Greenblatt demonstrates in elaborate detail, provided ''a way of organizing, articulating and making sense of a tangle of intense, intimate feelings in the wake of a loved one's death: longing, regret, guilt, fear, anger and grief.''

The widespread concern for souls in purgatory was also tapped by the Roman Catholic Church as a source of income through payments exacted for a variety of rites purported to end the suffering of the poor souls, and so the entire doctrine was sharply challenged by proponents of the Reformation. The consequence was a common equation in Protestant literature between purgatory and fantasy, fabrication, sheer imagination. The stage, in a literal sense of the term, was thus set for Shakespeare's representation of Richard III's portentous dreams, of life turned into the torments of purgatory in ''King Lear'' and, above all, of King Hamlet's ghost.

In all this elucidation of the 16th-century religious context, Greenblatt has quietly stepped away from the New Historicism, a movement that he helped to found two decades ago and that placed him at the forefront of literary studies. The underlying strategy of the New Historicism was to adapt for the scrutiny of literary texts the vision of politics and history fostered by the French historian Michel Foucault. An entity that Foucault sometimes referred to as ''discourse,'' the linguistic and conceptual instrument of a dominant ideology of power everywhere present yet often invisible, was said to determine virtually all aspects of culture at a given historical moment. ''Shakespearean Negotiations,'' Greenblatt's 1987 collection of essays, was wedded to Foucault's theory of culture. The virtue of that theory in the hands of so resourceful a critic was to tease out the multifarious strands of connection between Shakespeare's plays and his larger political contexts. The disadvantage was that attention tended to be deflected from the imaginative power of the plays themselves, something that now deeply interests Greenblatt -- he speaks here of the ''magical intensity'' of ''Hamlet'' and complains that literary scholarship has become ''phobic about literary power.''

Though still fascinated by the minute manifestations of historical context, Greenblatt no longer assumes that considerations of ideology are paramount. On the contrary, the force of his account of the doctrine of purgatory is that it represents ''a sustained collective effort of the imagination,'' a story, a kind of spiritual landscape, a set of images and symbols that enabled people to cope with recurring fears, anxieties and ambivalences not particularly associated with a given system of power. This constellation of imaginative resources, precisely because its validity as anything but imagination had been cast into grave doubt during the 16th century, then wonderfully served the purposes of one of the supreme masters of the poetic imagination.

The last two chapters of ''Hamlet in Purgatory'' are devoted, respectively, to the presence of sundry spectral figures and their dream refractions in Shakespeare's plays, and to the ghost in ''Hamlet.'' In the first of these two chapters, the connection with the doctrine of purgatory is sometimes a little oblique, as Greenblatt himself concedes at one point, but the exposition nevertheless abounds in insight. Shakespeare's sense of the intrinsic theatricality of ghosts is repeatedly emphasized: ''They are good for thinking about theater's capacity to fashion realities, to call realities into question, to tell compelling stories, to puncture the illusions that these stories generate and to salvage something on the other side of disillusionment.''

Turning at last to ''Hamlet,'' Greenblatt shows the compelling relevance to the play of the imagery and the spiritual regimen of purgatory. His writing here is poised, precise and, when the occasion requires, eloquent, and he is consistently deft -- and to my mind convincing -- in showing the beautifully apt specificity of theological language that Shakespeare uses to map the traffic between the other world and this one. Let me cite just one central instance. When the ghost of Hamlet's father first appears to the prince, he announces himself, as most of us will recall, in these words: ''I am thy father's spirit, / Doomed for a certain term to walk the night, /And for the day confined to fast in fires / Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purged away.'' Greenblatt acutely observes that ''for a certain term'' is no mere filler but a deployment of the idea that souls are condemned to purgatory not for eternity but for a fixed time, and this reference to a limited period of torment then points to a middle realm of spirits, neither eternal hell nor paradise, that is invoked in the burning and purging of the last line here. King Hamlet, identifying himself as a soul in purgatory, thus confronts his son with a complex challenge of remembrance, vengeance and, through those two acts, redemption, which is required by the unredeemed spirit that the murdered father has become. As Greenblatt goes on to observe, ''The psychological in Shakespeare's tragedy is constructed almost entirely out of the theological.''

''Hamlet in Purgatory'' is an exemplary work of historically informed literary interpretation. It patiently deciphers for modern readers elements of a forgotten language of theology that gives color and force to certain literary works of the age, and such cultural archaeology is surely one of the principal justifications for the academic study of literature created in earlier times. The book is written, moreover, out of a perceptive regard for the subtlety and precision of the articulation of the human predicament in Shakespeare's tragedies. This sort of appreciation of the distinctive ''magical intensity'' of the poetic imagination has been eroded by many of the recent fashions in literary studies. Its renewal in this book is a cause for celebration.